Читать книгу Deadline Yemen (The Elizabeth Darcy Series) - Peggy Hanson - Страница 21

CHAPTER 17

“Oh, no, no!”cried Emma… “Let me hear anything rather than what you are all thinking of.”

Jane Austen, Emma

Eating solo in a hotel dining room is a strange experience, particularly in a distant place. You feel alone, yet are preternaturally aware of people around you. This is especially true if you’re the only woman and everyone else is smoking.

The dry scent of Turkish and Egyptian tobacco wasn’t unpleasant. After ordering spicy fenugreek halwa soup, I imagined myself in a little cocoon of my clothes and my table: loose khaki trousers, long-sleeved shirt, long-tailed jacket, minimal makeup, Mephisto sandals, stained white tablecloth…cozy.

To fend off a pervading male interest in my presence, I took out Emma for added cover and to complete the cocoon of privacy. While I wouldn’t want to live it, I find the rigid social order of nineteenth century England comforting. Here in twentieth century Yemen, it was echoed by a different sort of social rigidity, where women at home see only the men in their immediate families. More accurately, only men from their families see them. Peering out from the slits in their face cloths, the women wander through the city taking in its wonders, seeing everything, including men. Take off the face cloths, put costumes of the 1800’s England on them, give them parasols—they’d be almost the same. Certainly, from the standpoint of needing to marry to have an identity and place in society they were the same.

If only I’d hear from Halima!

When the waiter came with my food, I glanced around. Mr. Khaki Pants sat at the table nearest mine, pushing overcooked peas onto his knife. Not a bad-looking specimen. Craggy features, a little irregular. Blondish hair. Forty-five or fifty, about my age.

I nodded when our eyes accidentally met, and got a formal little bow—and a thoughtful, crooked grin. Almost as though he knew who I was, or as though we shared a secret. Had he seen me at the window, watching him in the sorghum patch with the two Yemeni men? Was he making fun of my long and apparently intimate conversation with Michael Petrovich on the plane? I squirmed.

Not with oil, I decided. Oil executives wouldn’t be staying at this hotel. They’d be in the Sheraton up on the hill, or the Taj Sheba downtown. The Dar al-Hamd was for minor government guests, representatives of voluntary groups, and diehard romantics like me. How did the Brit fit in?

There was a bowl of the famous Yemeni honey—the best coming from the incense area of the Wadi Hadhramaut. It was on every table, a staple like salt and pepper. I drizzled a lot on a piece of uninteresting white Western bread for dessert. Apparently, the good thin bread was made only for breakfast or the noon meal, when the whole country ate copiously in preparation for chewing the afternoon qat and staying awake sleepless for much of the night.

I‘d asked for my check and put glasses and sundry back in my purse when Khaki Pants stood up. Medium-to-tall, fit.

As he walked past my table, he smiled and said, “Evening,” in his cultured British voice.

Some of my best friends are Brits. I flashed a return smile, nodded, and lifted my eyes surreptitiously to the man’s exit.

As he reached the door, two people entered the dining room. One was a young woman in jeans and a sweatshirt. Perfect features. Blond hair. Deep olive tan. Stunning, even with the ubiquitous dust in her clothes and hair.

Her companion I already knew. No wonder Michael Petrovich hadn’t escorted me to the hotel last night! He clearly had something going already. Something quite young and glamorous, at that.